On A Whim
by A Pox Be Upon You
Summary: Pike's not giving in, won't give in, but Nero holds all the cards. Non-con implied but not shown.


There's a part of him that is deeply fascinated by the Narada's interior. The curved, chill outlines of its ribs loom over his upturned face, dark and glistening and organic, with its high central dome criss-crossed by hanging tendrils and catwalks that can seem like metal constructs in one slant of dim artificial light or knitted roots in a corresponding greenish shadow. In twenty years of exploration, he's never seen anything like it; starships come in all shapes and sizes but few, very few, appear this... uh... homegrown. Homegrown and so alien that every detail draws his still fully functioning left eye. (His right... he's not sure exactly what's wrong with his right. Which is probably for the best.)

He's had a lot of time to stare, since he's been flat on his back, strapped to a stone-fucking-slab for the last, oh, several hours, he thinks. Perhaps more. No way to count time except the small monotonous rhythms of this place, loud in his ears and on his sticky skin. His increasingly irregular heartbeat, fluttering in unexpected places; his eyelid, his shoulder, his thigh. The liquid lapping against the platform and dripping from stalactites and soaking through his shirt. And the pain, insidious, radiating up through his gut; that too has its progression to be tracked, calculated, measured, although he's pretty sure there's no set conversion rate from precise degrees of agony to seconds.

So. It's been a few hours, give or take. And his blood is so saturated with slug piss that he can barely remember talking, he can barely remember when he stopped being able to hold the words in his drugged, aching mouth, to breathe and focus all his attention on not letting the codes spill out like toads from a lady's throat, when his training came to nothing because, hey, no one else knew about engineered truth serum releasing arthropods and there goes that plan of action! Mozart and anti-interrogation techniques his ass. He's a mess of waking dreams and he talked but god help him he can't pin down the damning moment.

What he'd do for a big clock.

And then Nero's filling up his view, no kind of improvement on the Narada's ceiling.

"Hello, Christopher," he says, sitting on the edge of the bench, uncomfortably close, which is nothing new. "How's your head?"

Pike doesn't try to meet his eyes; his neck is stiff and tight where inhuman fingers left bruises because he did what he could to delay while he could, little comfort though that offers. "Crowded."

"There, there." Nero pats his arm. "It won't be for long."

Oh right. "Why am I still alive?"

"I want you to watch, first," Nero says. "I want you to understand me. Because I like you, Christopher." He moves up, caresses Pike's cheek, the thick callouses on his palm scraping painfully against the place where a guards caught Pike one on the jaw as he entered.

Pike doesn't bother to recoil: for one thing, if he did, his brain would probably slosh out of his ears. Besides, he's still analyzing and observing and coming to utterly useless conclusions, even now when the world has boiled down to pain and dark and humid air: and he's aware that what Nero wants is an audience and a prop in one, that if he doesn't react as he's supposed to he's useless, he's a frustration. Which is satisfying. He can afford to be petty now. Or, well, he can't, technically, and that's the point. Whatever.

"We're very similar, you know."

"So you've said. Funny how straps really highlight the differences."

He's ignored. "Angry and helpless. Except I still have a chance for redemption, Christopher. Pity it precludes yours, but what can you do?"

Pike chews on the inside of his cheek, tastes bile and metallic blood. The question is rhetorical and the drugs they pumped in to supplement the slug are wearing off; that's the only reason silence is even an option. Just as well. His first instinct is to blurt out something even more unnecessarily stupid than he's managed so far, and Nero might be bare-handed this time around but that doesn't mean much.

"And while the Earth is burning, you'll blame yourself," Nero continues, thoughtfully. He leans over until he is an inch away, his spine paralleling Pike's. "Like I did. The difference is... you'll be right."

Yes. He will. He has no illusions about where his fucking plan has left the Federation. He just has to hope that Spock can succeed where he failed before his failure can destroy Earth.

"Don't say anything," Nero says, maybe seeing the way Pike's jaw tightens, or maybe not; he clamps his hand over Pike's mouth. "There's no need. I know how it is, after all."

Pike bites down. He can't get purchase, but he does scrape off skin and Nero jerks back, cursing low and fast in Romulan, folding his fingers in over the wound before Pike can see, although a little dark green blood trickles across his knuckles, gratifyingly. Well, there goes his chance of meeting his self-hating doom – once what he's wrought is or isn't done (he's fairly sure he won't live to see the aftermath, either way) – in peace. Bastard has anger management problems. Haha. Ahaha.

Nero slaps him, hard enough that his vision wobbles and blurs around the edges, unless that's just the slug, who probably doesn't approve of all this seismic activity. "Humans. Honestly. You think you still have something to be loyal to, Christopher? The Federation? Earth? Your species? You betrayed them. You broke. Why fight me now?"

"Everyone breaks," Pike says, unsteadily, and he laughs a little, because what isn't funny about a crazy genocidal Romulan having a tantrum over a scraped knee? Hand. Thing. "You did. Doesn't make a fight any less worth it."

Nero's black-on-black eyes narrow. "I was never –"

"Sane? There are all sorts of ways to crack, 'Captain Nero'."

The rage slides under Nero's skin like an inverted mask and changes the lines of his face into an expression altogether familiar, despite the protruding bones in the wrong places and the color rising in his cheeks and the shifting, lively tattoos; smoke or steam or whatever it is softens the prosaic details and makes him look like a cheap special effect in a late 21st century holo. That, or one of the recurring nightmares researching his dissertation lent him.

Then Nero throws his leg over Pike, straddling his chest, and drags him up off the slab a fraction for the leverage to bite back or kiss him, it's impossible to tell. The old, cold metal strap digs into Pike's collarbone, more uncomfortable than he expected. And Nero's mouth is clammier than any human's, his strangely-hinged jaws stronger, and his teeth sharper; he forces Pike's mouth open easily and gnaws at him, shreds the corners of his mouth, the underside of his tongue, his hard palate, as if he could suck out Pike's very breath – or voice – like the meat of an oyster. Maybe he can: Pike is suffocating, the sullen heat is clogging his lungs, nose too flattened by Nero's forward face to be useful.

He can't see much at all now and there are fingernails digging into his cheekbone; he can't so much as turn his head a few degrees, thanks to Nero's one-handed grip. (The other hand is reaching up under his shirt, clawing at his flank). Pike doesn't particularly want to think about what is pressed against his stomach. All he can feel is Nero, draped across the length of him.

Finally the lunatic pulls back. Pike surfaces as best he can, gasping for damp, chill air, grateful for a moment, only then Nero reaches down: and when Pike flinches, he grins like a triumphant shark. If there is such a thing.

And he is thinking because he can't stop thinking, it's a knack he never did pick up, and when that look, which he's seen before on Nero's face, clicks with that recent memory, that tragic story – well. He gets it. He got it, actually. He sees how it happened, how this disaster unraveled. He was revolted then and he is horrified now; but now he can't stop himself from talking, he can't resist the impulse to spill spill spill, all his inhibitors wiped out and:

"You sick fuck."

"Humans," Nero says, shaking his head. "I'm not that bad, Christopher. You should –"

"This is what you've turned all your grief into? You honestly believe that everything you're doing is out of love? That every abomination you wreak is an act of, of devotion, an act that will somehow fucking compensate for losing your wife and your child and your world?"

"Every Federation planet will burn for her and for Romulus," Nero says. He's trembling, the cheer drained away, and he presses a button to release the bonds across Pike's chest; then he hauls Pike up for a second time until they are nose to nose. Pike doesn't bother to struggle, not when one arm is hanging limp and at a strange angle and Nero's hand is resting on the other elbow. "Every soul alive will snuff out and my loss won't be compensated for, Christopher. When I've destroyed Vulcan and Earth and you, too, she'll be dead."

"And to think she hasn't even been born yet," Pike says, bitterly. "You're a fool. If it doesn't compensate then you're doing this for no reason at all. You can't even remember the pain, can you? All you can remember is your own need to make the Federation pay for what it can't pay for, what nothing can pay for."

"Romulus," Nero snarls, tightening his hold on Pike's shirtfront, pinching the skin of his neck; "it can pay for Romulus, yes it can, Romulus will rise when the Federation is fallen –"

"As if you care," Pike whispers. He hears his rasping, quick and ugly, speech like vomit. He doesn't even know what he's saying. Nero is frozen, is listening, and he doesn't even know what he's saying. "I heard the way you talked. You loved the place for what it was. What do you want from a Romulan empire? You were a miner, you believed in stupid lovely ideals about serving your species."

It occurs to him that the handle of Nero's gun is in reach if he stretches.

"Politics is serving my species –"

"Politics is a game. And burning a galaxy's worth of civilizations? That's not for Romulus. That's all you, because you happen to feel like spreading the misery around and you have the means and the obsession and you think you have the right," Pike says, and stretches, on automatic.

"I –" Nero falters. He lowers his hand. It comes to rest on Pike's just as he wraps his thumb around the trigger.

Damn.

"I do have the right," Nero hisses, slamming him back against the table. "I –" he does it again to punctuate his own too-rapid rage "– am –" again, oh god, " – owed!"

He lets go. Pike slumps back nervelessly. He has no idea what he's done to Nero, he had a plan but it evaporated with the rest of them (and besides it involved the gun). It doesn't involve Nero throwing back the folds of his coat and replacing the bonds and sitting up.

"If you are correct, and I do what I do for myself, for my sick, sick desires..." Nero adds, softly, "well. Who will be left to tell me so when I am done? I think I prefer an empty solar system's silence to your moral high ground. Until then – I'll keep no qualms about my whims."

He touches Pike's inner thigh. Squeezes.

Pike opens his mouth and closes his mouth and closes his eyes.


End file.
